Can the camera be racist? The question is explored in an exhibition that reflects on how Polaroid built an efficient tool for South Africa’s apartheid regime to photograph and police black people.

The London-based artists Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin spent a month in South Africa taking pictures on decades-old film that had been engineered with only white faces in mind. They used Polaroid’s vintage ID-2 camera, which had a “boost” button to increase the flash – enabling it to be used to photograph black people for the notorious passbooks, or “dompas”, that allowed the state to control their movements.

The result was raw snaps of some of the country’s most beautiful flora and fauna from regions such as the Garden Route and the Karoo, an attempt by the artists to subvert what they say was the camera’s original, sinister intent.

Broomberg and Chanarin say their work, on show at Johannesburg’s Goodman Gallery, examines “the radical notion that prejudice might be inherent in the medium of photography itself”. They argue that early colour film was predicated on white skin: in 1977, when Jean-Luc Godard was invited on an assignment to Mozambique, he refused to use Kodak film on the grounds that the stock was inherently “racist”.

The light range was so narrow, Broomberg said, that “if you exposed film for a white kid, the black kid sitting next to him would be rendered invisible except for the whites of his eyes and teeth”. It was only when Kodak’s two biggest clients – the confectionary and furniture industries – complained that dark chocolate and dark furniture were losing out that it came up with a solution.

The artists feel certain that the ID-2 camera and its boost button were Polaroid’s answer to South Africa’s very specific need. “Black skin absorbs 42% more light. The button boosts the flash exactly 42%,” Broomberg explained. “It makes me believe it was designed for this purpose.”

In 1970 Caroline Hunter, a young chemist working for Polaroid in America, stumbled upon evidence that the company was effectively supporting apartheid. She and her partner Ken Williams formed the Polaroid Workers Revolutionary Movement andcampaigned for a boycott. By 1977 Polaroid had withdrawn from South Africa, spurring an international divestment movement that was crucial to bringing down apartheid.

The title of the exhibition, To Photograph the Details of a Dark Horse in Low Light, refers to the coded phrase used by Kodak to describe a new film stock created in the early 1980s to address the inability of earlier films to accurately render dark skin.

The show also features norm reference cards that always used white women as a standard for measuring and calibrating skin tones when printing photographs. The series of “Kodak Shirleys” were named after the first model featured. Today such cards show multiple races.

Broomberg and Chanarin made two recent trips to Gabon to photograph a series of rare Bwiti initiation rituals using Kodak film stock, scavenged from eBay, that had expired in 1978. Working with outdated chemical processes, they salvaged just a single frame. Broomberg said: “Anything that comes out of that camera is a political document. If I take a shot of the carpet, that’s a political document.”

Related content

A new photographic exhibition in New York examines the legacy of the apartheid system through nearly 500 photographs, films, books, magazines and newspapers, covering more than 60 years of South African history

For the best part of 20 years, Manic Street Preachers’ mouthpiece Nicky Wire has been taking and collecting polaroids of the controversial band. As the best of them are published in a book, he tells Gareth Grundy about the stories behind the shots

Kerry’s account has been “limited”, as Paypal put it, but for all intents and purposes it is closed. She cannot withdraw funds nor even check her transaction history.

I’m sure some of my readers will think this is a reasonable action on the part of Paypal, but given the resolution of the Smashwords censorship incident this Spring it really is not.

After having been bludgeoned by half the internet (yours truly included), Paypal revised their policy on book censorship to exclude the text of the books. Paypal was only going to object to specific titles:

First and foremost, we are going to focus this policy only on e-books that contain potentially illegal images, not e-books that are limited to just text. The policy will prohibit use of PayPal for the sale of e-books that contain child pornography, or e-books with text and obscene images of rape, bestiality or incest (as defined by the U.S. legal standard for obscenity: material that appeals to the prurient interest, depicts sexual conduct in a patently offensive way, and lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value).

If you look at the cover image again, you will probably agree that Amelia’s book is allowed under Paypal’s new policy. I don’t think I was stretching things by writing that it was a relatively tame image; I have seen more explicit imagery on M/F romance novels.

So what we have here is a book with a cover which the author is allowed to sell under Paypal’s policy while at the same time the author is not allowed to pay the cover artist.

Yes, it is that bizarre.

I have reached out to Paypal for comment, but apparently no one is watching the Facebook page or reading emails, and Anuj Nayar, the Director of Communications at PayPal, does not read his email on the weekends. More fool him.

TBH, I think we’re looking at a mistake on the part of Paypal. There is a clear contradiction between the previously stated policy and the account closure.

But in the absence of a statement from Paypal I can only assume that this is going to be yet another incident where the Internet is going to have to beat up on Paypal until they back down.

Someone pass me a torch.

Update: Paypal restored Kerry’s account. While I still have not heard anything from Paypal (and she was told the account closure was permanent), it seems that Paypal does have someone watching news blogs on the weekend.